Capstone team (minus one) awarded Best in Show: Graduate
Problem Space
Seattle Children's Hospital (SCH) is building a new building where the outpatient cancer clinic will be moving to when completed. The SCH team behind the new outpatient cancer clinic project wanted to sponsor a team that would use the human centered design process to design the end to end waiting room experience for the clinic.
Patient families often experience feelings of distress, fear, and boredom at the hospital. Additionally, they may spend long amounts of time just waiting during a visit. Some of these families go to the hospital multiple times in a week. When all those times are added, it is clear a significant amount is lost to waiting, and patients and their families may miss out on important milestone or events.
These factors are what drove us to our design research question:
How might we create an experience that is engaging and supportive for pediatric cancer patients and families while they're waiting?
Outpatient cancer clinic waiting room - Activity space (Jan 2019)
Outpatient cancer clinic waiting room - Seating area (Jan 2019)
One entrance into the outpatient cancer clinic waiting room (Jan 2019)
Research Methods
To truly understand what is happening in the pediatric hospital landscape, in architecture and interior design, what contributes to healing, and how patient families feel about the current waiting room space, we needed to do a lot of research both exploratory and investigative. We utilized numerous research methods to gain as much insight as possible and to triangulate our collected data.
Exploratory
Exploratory research methods included literature reviews, article reviews, and a comparative analysis of pediatric hospitals across the country that have done recent renovations or additions.
Understanding the Current Space
To understand how patients, patient families, and staff of the outpatient cancer clinic think and feel about the current waiting room, we conducted a survey, interviews, creative research activities, and observations.
An immersive room that St Jude's hospital has added for their patients. One of the things we learned from our comparative analysis: immersive technology to promote healing and a positive experience in the hospital.
Research Process
In this section is the break down of how we conducted each method during the investigate portion of our research (i.e., understanding the current space) and why we chose it.
Surveys
We chose to conduct a survey to gain a baseline understanding of what patient families think about the current outpatient cancer clinic waiting room. The survey gave us quantitative data on various areas such as staff friendliness, room cleanliness, activities provided, etc.
We based our survey on a standard questionnaire for clinic occupancy evaluations by the Center for Health Design and used Google Forms to publish our survey. SCH sent our survey to patient families who have spent time in the outpatient cancer clinic and are part of their Patient Family Advisory Group.
Interviews
To gather qualitative insights to understand the why's that was not uncovered in the survey, we conducted interviews with parents of patients who spent time in the outpatient cancer clinic. Through these interviews, we gathered great details such as what families bring to entertain themselves, why they like or dislike something in the waiting room, etc.
We also interviewed subject matter experts (i.e., medical assistants, child life specialists, clinic greeters, and a nurse supervisor) to learn their perspective on what they see and experience when in the waiting room with patient families. Hearing from these experts gave us additional insights that supplement what we learned from families.
Creative Research Activities
It was important to us that we also hear from the patients themselves because the essence of this project is to design this new waiting experience for them. It was difficult to schedule interviews with patients due to patients being in school or undergoing treatment. To overcome this challenge, we got creative and did guerrilla research in the current waiting room. Our guerrilla research took the form of creative research activities: drawing for younger patients and fill-in-the-blanks MadLibs style forms for the older patients. For the drawing activity, we prompted them to draw what they think of when they are in the hospital or what they wish they could be doing instead. In the fill-in-the-blanks MadLibs style activity, there were prompts such as "I feel ____ when I come to the hospital", "Three words I would use to describe the waiting room ____, ____, and ____.", "Things I like to do when I'm home: _____________."
The other researcher on the team & I set up a small space in the waiting room where we had printout versions of the activities, information on what they were for, and a submission box to deposit the activities if patients happened to come across the activities when neither of us were present. When we were present, we approached families who were waiting to be called in, introduced ourselves, explained why we were there and what we wanted to do, and handed the activities to the patients if they agreed.
Observations
We also spent time in the outpatient cancer clinic waiting room observing patient families who were waiting. We did observations to supplement all the research data collected from the other methods. Through observations, we were able to see where patient families like to sit, what they bring with them, and what they do while they wait.
Creative activity packets
Creative activity submission box
Examples of drawings from patients
Analysis
Qualitative
We used Miro (formerly RealTimeBoard) to do a giant thematic analysis from all the qualitative data we gathered. Through thematic analysis, we identified themes and trends from the collected data regarding the current waiting room in the outpatient cancer clinic.
Quantitative
We used Google Sheets to analyze the quantitative data from the survey. We used count to measure frequency and averages for rating scales. We also used Google Sheets to create an aggregate spreadsheet for the number of times a theme or trend popped up in the different research methods.
Aggregate spreadsheet across all research methods conducted to understand the current waiting room
Findings
We learned numerous things from analyzing and synthesizing our data. However, five main themes of patient family needs popped up. Patients and their families have needs that are not being met with the experience in the current waiting room. These patient family needs are identity, control, activities, social connection, and environmental comfort.
Knowing that our final deliverables should meet these major patient family needs, these five themes drove our design process.
Deliverables
Our team went through many iterations and a couple workshops during the design phase of this project. The final deliverable we presented to SCH is a playbook of recommendations and programmatic diagrams of the future space.
The playbook consists of recommendations whether they are physical or digital that would meet one of the themes of patient family needs. The playbook also explains each patient family need and why it is necessary to meet them. We provided physical copies of the playbook but also have a digital version as well which can be here.
Using the architectural blueprints of the future space, we created programmatic diagrams to suggest where they can incorporate different recommendations we provided. We included reasons as to why each suggestion is important.
Playbook for SCH
Programmatic diagram of the future space
Impact
This capstone project was impactful to our team and to SCH. This project showed me how the human centered design process can be used in other areas and industries.
For SCH, we showed them what the human centered design process is and how it can be utilized, so they can use the process for future projects. We generated 4x more facility recommendations for SCH to pursue because we used the human centered design process. Additionally, the purchasing team has made changes to their orders for the future space.
Lastly, our team won the "Best in Show: Graduate" capstone award at the 2019 HCDE Open House.
Our team's capstone poster
